Millions of conventional bottles contain non-food, food, food supplements or medications sold to consumers every day. For most medical or health related applications, the contents (pills inside these bottles) have to be taken regularly. Keeping track of regular doses of medications can be difficult. Skipping or over dosages of certain medications can be deadly. Unfortunately, these millions of sold (pill) bottles have no intelligence to notify or remind their owners to take the contents inside the bottles. Some other reminder devices do exist, but they are expensive to build, complicated to use, take extra shelve/drawer storage space to store and, most of all, those reminder devices are not compatible and cannot convert conventional bottles and conventional bottle caps into reminder bottles. There are needs for a user-friendly, simple, low-cost, effective and better way to “convert” these conventional dumb bottle or their caps into smart reminder device to remind users to take the contents inside these bottles.
Medication non-compliance is a major problem in healthcare. Physicians prescribe medications for a large class of chronic, asymptomatic diseases. These medications must typically be taken daily for the rest of the patient's life in order to sustain quality of life and reduce health risks.
Many food and drug substances are distributed within bottle containers. Because these substances are destined for human consumption, there is desired that the container never be opened prior to use by the ultimate owner and user of the bottle. Unfortunately, present bottles can be opened, and foreign or even poison sub-stances added, without a clear indication later that the bottle has been opened. Consequently it is desired to provide a device which will signal that a container has been opened.
Various prior art exist today for detecting the opening and closing of pills bottles using mechanical switches or infrared transceivers coupled to bottle caps, and for conveying that information electronically to a patient monitoring and compliance system, and for reminding patients regarding the dosage. Prior art exists for tamper detection of bottles and containers using mechanically coupled switches, with tamper related information conveyed to point of sales terminal or monitoring system using RFID or other wireless based solutions. No solution is known for monitoring and reminding dosage for liquid medication, or for their tamper detection, other than visible seals that could potentially be carefully broken and put back.
Mechanical switches in bottle caps can get contaminated and may be difficult to clean. They can get jammed or could fail. They are not good for liquid medication. They are not good for tamper detection as the switch could be fooled by mechanical means. Infrared transmitter and detector surface can get covered with contamination, and could be fooled for tamper detection. There are no known solutions that can combine tamper detection with dosage monitoring in an economical way suitable for mass markets.
It would be advantageous to provide a robust non-mechanical means for detection of opening and closing of a medicine bottle so that the mechanism is free from contamination and mechanical failures, and that can work with liquid medication.
It would also be advantageous to provide an opening and closing detection of a medicine bottle that can be used for foolproof tamper detection.
It would further be advantageous to provide an opening and closing detection of a medicine bottle that can be integrated into a patient medication compliance monitoring network and system.